Grog: A Tale of Ribaldry
by Morosetintedglasses
Summary: “Dear heart, Cap’n Jack’d never take advantage of your naiveté, your desperate need for attention, and especially not your sexual frustration over having lost your wedding night.” JE. M for UnDisneyfied Jack, dark humor and general twistedness.


Grog: A Tale of Ribaldry

To say that it's hot would be a gross understatement. This is the savage eye of hell enthroned in the sky, glaring down at our conquered heroine Elizabeth Swann, curled futilely in a cramped corner of shade beneath the main mast. It's high noon, when the shadows coalesce underfoot, and the sun batters your forehead and poor Elizabeth trying desperately to cling to her shrinking spot of shade as it swings forward and aft in time with the ship climbing the endless procession of swells. And the worst part is that the sun is deviously angled in such a way as to force the shade aft as the ship dips forward, and forward as the ship slants aft, forcing her, as exhausted and sun-scorched as she is, to crawl back and forth, uphill, against the tilt of the ship in her struggle to maintain that tiny speck of shade. As one would imagine, the effect of this constant rolling coupled with the feverish beat of the Caribbean sun makes her stomach suddenly seize up and twist, and wells the burning bile up her esophagus—bugger! She'll vomit herself ragged if she keeps this up. She stands, sways. Her head's still rolling. And the heat's dropped another twenty pounds on her sagging shoulders. She staggers to the rail.

"Havin' ye been drinkin'? Do ye need someone t' take ye t' bed?" a lecherous voice calls from the crow's nest. His proposition seems a tad ambitious for a double-amputee.

"Bloody pirates," she mutters, and hisses.

The grinding _b_ and _p_ smarts on her sun-cracked lips. Clearly all labials are out of the question, and until they heal all use of "**b**uccaneer" "**b**rigand" "**b**andit" "**p**ervert" and especially "**B**ar**b**arous Re**p**ro**b**ate" is out of the question, leaving her with "scalawag" "degenerate" and "scoundrel"…though "**m**iscreant", " **f**iend" and "**f**lagitious **v**illain" would be tempting fate.

She licks her lips, though she knows what's to come. Her saliva soothes the rawness for a moment, but the merciless sun parches them rapidly, and she winces as the salt sting of the sea air nips at her with renewed vigor. Worth a try. By now, her tongue is parchment and she needs water. Lots of water. Water to swell her so full that she'll be roughly the size of a fifth-class frigate. Then she'll dive off the quarter deck and float home. But freshwater is denser than saltwater—she would probably sink like the anchor and drown. Still—it's better than being on this wreck, crewed by lascivious pirates, and the worst of the whole lot,

"Jack!--" she sputters, happy that the name lacks any _p_'s, _b_'s, _m_'s,_ f_'s or _v_'s, though this sentiment sours rapidly. She's never happy to say Jack, because that means she's speaking to Jack and she's sore for an excuse to never utter that name again. Then again, she's already been startled into that mistake by the Captain's sudden appearance, so she may as well press on.

"What are you doing here?"

"Simply performing my Captainly duty of eschewing such perils as sandbars, reefs, the British Navy and mollusk-faced bogeymen on ghost ships…and turbid water."

"What?" Elizabeth had been busy prying the lid off of a barrel marked "WATER" during the course of his rambling.

"Only that I wouldn't drink the water on a pirate ship, dear missy. Why d'ya think pirates drink so much rum?"

Why is he doing this? She just wants some relief from the heat—and how is he wearing that heavy frock-coat? He must be roasting—let him.

"To satisfy your lecherous desire for hedonism and debauchery." She sounds like she's rolling pebbles in her mouth as she talks around using her lips.

"Well, there's that—and water stored in a barrel over long periods of time can get rather mangy."

He's trying to manipulate her into drinking vast quantities of rum so that he can have his way with her, and if she lets him keep talking, he just might. Ha! It's just water. Water never hurt anyone…except for tsunamis, flash floods, drownings—all right, it has, but a cool glass of water in the heathen Caribbean sun is nothing but welcome and relief. She scoops a handful out of the barrel and into her mouth, then another and another, shoveling like a water mill and—my _god_. She spews the revolting mess back onto the deck, doubles over on hands and knees, coughing and gagging but it's stuck hard to her mouth like tar, so rank, her stomach roils—"oh—god—no"—and retches and the sour soup of salted pork and stomach acids floods her mouth. Sealing her lips, she crawls to the side and lets it dribble into the ocean.

Her first reaction is to wash the dregs out with water. She curses, frustrated—the sunlight's stabbing her eyes, and she's surrounded by excited whistling.

"Back to work, lads! It's not as if you've never seen a lady being sick before."

How indecorous! "Who stores fetid water on a ship--"she winces. The water has certainly taken the edge off the pain of labials, but her lips still twinge a bit under the staccato of the word as she screams it.

"Something wrong?" He kneels beside her. She suddenly becomes aware of a soggy lump of vomit sliding down her neck. She bows her head. Maybe he won't notice. Not that she cares a whit for what he thinks about how she looks with sick on her face, but she knows that she would never hear the end of it. No, not from Jack Sparrow. _Dear William, half-digested hard tack really brings out yer girl's eyes._

"It's no use trying to hide that. And it'd be advantageous t'ya if your health were more important to you than your modesty, love."

She lifts her head, defiance burning in her eyes.

"And don't look so rebellious if you're just going to go along with what I ask." Her gaze drops. That was a bit silly.

He inspects her, eyes resting on her cracked lips with no appreciable change of expression. She's indignant for a moment. How can he be so nonchalant? Those bloody hurt!

"In my expert opinion, that is to say my fourth-hand medical knowledge gleaned from the back-alleys of Barcelona, you're dehydrated—and you've got a rather nasty case of pigheadedness. Very unbecoming in a lady."

She's fuming inside, but forces a smile.

"And what is your suggested treatment, Doctor Sparrow?" The last bit is said through clenched teeth. She can't see ever unclenching them. Not around Jack. She'll require a liquid diet for the rest of the voyage. Which unfortunately would leave her with one dietary option.

"Rum."

"Rum?"

"For both."

----------------------------------------------------

"Now, water, when stored for months at a time, in a barrel, on a ship, grows algae, mold, and all sorts of other nasties. The water's only as sanitary as the barrel, and surely your virtuous mind can't imagine the unpleasant things pirates do with barrels, savvy? For example, sometimes when a man is on a long voyage, with ne'er a woman in sight for months at a time, he has certain needs, needs that can only be satisfied through the hole in a—"

"—Jack!"

"Right. We still need water, so we add something to it to get rid of the taste. "This," he slides a cracked, dirty mug across the splintered table, "is grog."

"Grog?" She wrinkles her nose. The name itself sounds fairly disgusting, and the object in question looks no better. The liquid is a murky amber color, with bits of something greenish swishing about in it.

"Yes. A safe way to keep yourself hydrated, even when your water's gone by the wayside. You see, when one tries to drink ship water, it's so foul that he gets sick, and retches the full contents of his belly onto the deck, just like you did. But, you add a bit of Rum to said water, the rum overpowers the fetid water taste, and you've got grog."

"You're not honestly suggesting that I drink that because you're telling me to."

"No, I'm suggesting that you drink that so that your lungs don't dry out, killing you slowly as you suffocate on your own respiratory secretions. Then again, I'm not a doctor, just some scalawag trying to get into your knickers."

She takes the glass. "How much rum is in this?"

"Oh, not much at all, really. It's just there for the flavor." Rum for the flavor. Now that is ludicrous. Still, if it will offer some relief. She takes an experimental sip, and spits it back out. Eugh! This 'grog' is worse than the algae water! It's algae water that burns the algae taste to the back of your throat where your tongue can't scrape it off!

"Oh my God, that was horri—Jack…I'm so sorry." She's sprayed him with the mixture. He seems unconcerned. "Aren't you angry?"

"No worries, luv. It was far worse in Tripoli."

Elizabeth starts to inquire about what happened in Tripoli, but realizes that she probably is better off not knowing.

"How can you drink that?"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you, that the trick to grog 'sthat you've got to drink one full glass before you get used to the taste."

"…Right."

She wants to scream and leave the cabin in a fit, but the relief from the initial sip is fading, and she does not want to have to come crawling back, all niceness and apologies, asking for some 'grog', _because apparently Doctor Sparrow, I find your prescription distasteful, but after a few hours of fever and searing pain I realized that I don't really have an alternative. You were right and I was wrong._ No! She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. Indeed, he's probably daring her to leave, anticipating that very scene acting itself out before the day is out.

"A full glass first." She raises it, determined to see this through, _or die vomiting—trying! Die trying._

He smiles, broad and toothily. She hates that smile. His teeth are so dirty they look fibrous, like a sodden rug. They make her unconsciously scrub her teeth with her tongue.

"To oral hygiene, and the ability to eat solid foods well into our latter years." He frowns, concealing his matty-browns.

Elizabeth gulps the grog as quickly as she can, forcing down the drink against her stomach rebelliously threatening to push it all back up. This is wretched! If Jack were puréed, this is how he'd taste. Fish and salt and rum and mud and urine and mold and vermin and rot and burning! Finished!

She slams the mug down.

"Well done, little missy."

"Spare me your compliments and just get me more," she growls.

"Catty, are we then?" He scurries away.

The grog is livid in her mouth. She clenches her hands over her middle rocking and squeezing shut her eyes she tries to imagine the sweet sour meat of grapes, and they look appetizing in her head, but they burn of grog all the same in her mouth, and she's sure she's just ruined grapes for the rest of her life and where in God's name is Jack, because she's going to throw that compass into that smirking, self-assured, dirty face of his because _the only reason I want him is to kill him or at least hand me more of that wretched poison and did someone put billows to the sun, because it's a lot warmer down here and_ _I can't even feel my tongue_—a pause—she slides her tongue along the roof of her mouth and realizes that the horrid grog taste has dissipated, but she's still so thirsty.

"Jack!"

"Aye, sweet'eart. Ready for more?" He sets two full glasses in front of her.

"Yes. I can't even taste it anymore it's just like you said."

"I'm a man of me word, and…" but she's already taking a long drink from the first glass, when she comes up for air, she sputters,

"I should apologize, Jack. I was shuspish-suspis…sus-pic-ious that you only wanted me to drink rum s'that you could…"

"Dear heart, Cap'n Jack'd never take advantage of your naiveté, your desperate need for attention, and especially not your sexual frustration over having lost your wedding night."

"…what?" The first glass is empty.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Just keep hydrating yourself, duck."

Sound advice. She keeps drinking. Her lips feel much better, but it definitely is becoming warmer. It must be that the heat's trapped because the door's—was that closed bef—never mind, it's hot. She tries to pull off her hard leather vest, but she can't quite get it over her head.

"That has buttons, you know, great big brass ones. Great for unbuttoning."

"Mmmffmm," through the vest. It's stuck over her face, and her arms are pinned straight up.

"What?"

"I CAN'T!" She flails her arms, demonstrating that her hands can't reach said buttons, the vest is stuck mid-way up her arms and it's dark in here _could someone please get this off…_

Rough hands jerk the vest down her front—so close! She didn't know Jack was so close to her, a moment ago he was behind the table but she doesn't mind at all because his soft exhales are cooling her flushed cheeks like humid summer nights when you jump into bed and press your face against the cool bed sheets—bed sheets with a _really_ high thread count, but that's so deceptive because sand-colored calluses have mounded on his hands, dirt cemented into the crevasses. Still, he doesn't have big, meaty sailor's hands, the ones with the huge palms and stubby fingers, like bear paws. She had always instinctively recoiled from them—she was afraid she'd be the salmon. But Jack, he has long fingers, good for delicate tasks, with sprawling webs of fine, spidery lines delved into his palms—a water hand. Her governess had showed her a bit of palmistry when Elizabeth was a girl, until she'd been hanged as a witch. But a water hand—always following the currents in his life, his emotions are like the flowing of water—running sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes tranquil as a mill-pond, sometimes stormy as a tempest. Adaptable, versatile and flexible as water. He's kind, sympathetic, intuitive—and conversely withdrawn, addictive, destructive…and vulnerable. Full of secrets…Jack.

"You still awake, darling? This is rather difficult without your cooperation. I mean, I certainly _could_, but it's just not as lively."

She must have trailed off…and the vest trailed off…and her shirt is in the process of trailing off, but her chest is tight with sobs because for the first time she realizes that Jack's bravado is a mask for pain and insecurity and loneliness and they're just emotional walls built up over the years to keep everyone out because he's desperately afraid of being hurt, and all he really wants is someone to prove that the punishment for trusting someone isn't betrayal and that you can never be happy shut up in your own personal Hell, just alone. And when you shut out pain, you shut out pleasure it's stifling but it's stifling in here with the cabin door shut and a shaft of hard sunlight blazing through the porthole and smothering her softly. And Jack—it's all just a cry for affection.

"Right then, if you prefer to do it quietly…" he's pulling the man's shirt from her shoulders, but lust is just keeping love at a distance for Jack, she knows it, obligingly lifting her arms so he can peel off the garment. And she's been so tightly closed with her feminine sealing wax stamped on her virtue so that after her proper Presbyterian wedding with a proper Presbyterian man he can have the satisfaction of breaking open the seal until then she's to remain honorably unbroken—but she doesn't have to worry about that because Jack's melting it away and she's anxious for him to pour over her secrets. She'll pour them out.

He's dropping his clothes as fast as he can—pistol, coins and other effects clattering hollow on the planks.

"Jack," she's panting. Something's stolen her breath. "Y'don—Y'don't need t'be afraid of love."

A beat. Two.

"I think you'll need to show me, then. Immediately. Before my fears can catch up with me again."

"Yes!" that's exactly what she's been thinking.

Her gaze tilts upward and then she's locked in his eyes, set in their kohl frames and she wonders if it hides his eyes or buoys them out at the world.

He smiles—smirks—the left corner's stretched higher than the right and he pulls in the line connecting their gazes, and with his lips drawing to her she senses a sort of finality of bells tolling in vibrating flagstones. Turnabout! Turnabout!—to where to where? Hard to port! Hard to starboard! Tugged in both directions, she skids along the compass edge, forward. She's impaled on his kiss, at least she feel so—like he's stabbed her through with a barbed point and suddenly it's like her feet have been swept up from under her and her mission's slipped through her fingers like water and it's Jack's hands roaming up her back, Jack's rough lips and hot tongue, Jack's hard, wiry body crushing against hers, especially the hard knot crushed against her belly that makes her rise on her tiptoes to meet the bowsprit with her pulsating lump of molten magma with its own powerful magnetic attraction and she's been turned 180 degrees, like when she was a girl playing with magnets and the North pole would repel the other North, but when you turned one around they mashed together in magnetic South-to-North ecstasy and she's pressing harder hoping to be enfolded—him in her in him. She'll enmesh with the dark, greasy grime smeared on his cheeks, and the stink of rot on his breath, and the filth under his broken fingernails, and it'll be like rolling dough in the dirt and all metaphor is beggary because she can't breathe and she can hardly blame the humidity for that now…

"Jack…" panting, gasping, hands roaming up the tanned planes of his scar-torn back for some purchase.

"Yes love," his heads tilted down, lids narrowed, faint smile on his face and no twitching, disorientation or madness and she's never seen him so focused, in his element and firmly planted on the ground anchored to her in this moment in the flames…

"Elizabeth?"

"…I've forgotten."

"Well, just hold onto that attitude and you'll come out of this relatively unscathed."

What did he—no matter…he's hooked his thumbs around his waistband, and she's aching for the sweetness of Hell, to drink the fire, to have it spread its tendrils out inside her and it's all nonsense and spasms now, glory and salvation and damnation rolled into a primordial ball…sliding down sparsely furred, muscle-cut thighs and the moment of truth and animal ignorance, and there it is, the blunt fist of fate, and—

"OH MY GOD!"

"What, don't you like it?"

She's dropped hard on her feet, in the cabin, in lucidity. She's got her bearings. This is revolting. A livid jungle of festering infections of varying shapes, sizes and ooziness cover…_it_. She backs up, like she would from a hissing, rabid rat.

"Most certainly not! By the looks of it, you've got at least…three venereal diseases!"

"Ah, well, actually, that's three _visible_ venereal diseases. There's plenty more whose symptoms are either latent, or at least not manifested on my—Oi! Where are going?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------

She wants water. Holy water. And she _won't_ settle for "holy grog".

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Days later, she's regained the stomach to be near him, and more particularly ,_it_, and has firmly convinced herself that it won't burst through his trousers and bite her like a tarantula.

"Jack, what was the exact concentration of rum in that grog you gave me?"

"Oh, only about fifty percent."

"Fifty percent? You said it's not much at all."

"Exactly, to a pirate…who just wants to get into your knickers."

FIN.--Or is it?

Ok, it is.

A/N: Liked it? Review! Reviews feed my famished soul.

Hated it? Well, I'll just go on sucking if you don't review.


End file.
